How Ars readers cope with bad Netflix and YouTube performance

VPNs, DNS, and... DSL? If only we could just get some broadband competition.

One of the most common complaints from Internet users is how slow streaming video services like YouTube and Netflix can be. There are various reasons for bad performance, ranging from technical glitches to business conflicts, but when low-quality video is the result, it's frustrating and hard to avoid.

That doesn't mean that users can't try a variety of methods to speed up that video. This week, we asked Ars readers to share their streaming video strategies, and we got more than 100 responses. Here are some of the most interesting.

VPNs, DNS, and proxy servers

As we've written, a VPN (virtual private network) or third-party DNS (Domain Name System) service can improve streaming performance by routing traffic away from congested links. This can also have the opposite of its intended effect because it tends to force video traffic over a longer path by distance. But numerous users said the strategy has indeed worked wonders for them.

"It's effectively unusable during those time periods," rodalpho wrote. "I tried blocking their cache CDNs (206.111.0.0/16 and 173.194.55.0/24), no dice. I tried switching to Google DNS and easyDNS, no improvement. Activating a VPN immediately solved my problem, but I don't want to pay for a VPN just to make YouTube work. I want Time Warner to fix the problem. It's been over a year, and they haven't, and I don't expect them to. So I just don't use YouTube during prime time."

Similarly, MatthiasF of Maryland routes traffic through a proxy service to improve YouTube quality. "The very few times YouTube messes up for me here in Maryland, I use a proxy located in Texas," MatthiasF wrote. "It seems like the connections to the Northeast YouTube servers (South Carolina) get congested every so often, but the ones in Oklahoma are usually fine (probably because of the hour difference and far fewer people)."

Gordon942 of Berkeley, CA reports using a VPN to fix Netflix on Comcast. "Between about 4:30pm and midnight, Netflix on Comcast will only play extremely low quality SD and will buffer for a long time about every 30 seconds," the commenter wrote. "To fix this, I signed up for a VPN from Private Internet Access. It's about $7 a month, and it totally fixes the problem. With the VPN active, I get instantaneous HD with no buffering any time of the day."

Netflix users on Comcast should start seeing better quality even without a VPN because of a new agreement between the companies to exchange traffic directly.

Ars commenters noted that connecting to a VPN on a computer is easy enough, but getting all video-capable devices onto a VPN may require reconfiguring a router and can thus be a hassle.

Eurynom0s, a Verizon FiOS user in Washington, DC, wrote that a VPN improves Netflix on a computer, but it's still unwatchable on a TV not connected to a VPN. "Last night I had to use Netflix from my computer on my TV to get a watchable streaming quality despite having a smart TV with a Netflix app (since it's a 60", the shitty quality is ESPECIALLY noticeable, plus last night it kept pausing to rebuffer, too). When I plugged my computer in instead, I instantly got better quality," the commenter wrote. "Now I'm going to have to dig out my old Linksys router with Tomato on it and try to figure out if I can set it up as a VPN tunnel for the TV. At least I already had the VPN and already own a router, but it's still unbelievable that I have to waste my time setting all this up just to get what I'm already paying for."

The extra effort is worth it, says Borzwazie, a Comcast user, who set up a wireless router to connect all devices on the local network to Private Internet Access. "The difference is night and day," Borzwazie wrote. "I'm actually getting the bandwidth I pay for now with Comcast (25 down/5 up). Netflix and YouTube run great, and I can actually stream HD now. Web browsing is snappy. Steam downloads are fast. There's occasional variability, but overall I am very satisfied. If this change isn't evidence of the network shenanigans at Comcast, I don't know what is."

Getting more advanced

Other users got a little more complicated. DemBones79, a Verizon FiOS user in Maryland, "manually block[ed] the YouTube IP ranges specified in the Mitch Ribar post, though I did it in the router itself. This helped a lot for YouTube (though there's still the occasional troublesome video)." DemBones79 also "manually specified the OpenDNS IP addresses for my DNS server in the router." This has apparently helped speed up browsing on some websites, but Netflix is still troublesome.

Geese, a commenter in Virginia on Verizon FiOS, wrote that "Netflix is damn near unusable during late primetime (8pm EST to 1am EST). I pay for a 75 down/35 up connection because I run some company testing/lab servers in a basement rack. I can download anything at 5MB/s whenever I want, but streaming from Netflix is like snorkeling with a coffee stirrer whenever it's prime time."

Geese's solution? "I'm looking into a VPS [a virtual private server hosted in a data center] with a proxy to get around whatever they're doing. It's ridiculous."

On the easier side, some users have installed browser extensions with success. Extensions that add an option to YouTube for downloading videos are particularly useful, wrote grimlog.

"The easiest way to beat slow YouTube streaming speeds? Use any of the myriad browser extensions for downloading YouTube videos," grimlog wrote. "It's often the only way I can watch long-form content posted on YouTube. On Comcast, videos often freeze for over a minute as it buffers, but if I download that video instead, I can max out my DL speeds… I don't know why streaming speeds are so much slower than downloading speeds, but sometimes, it's a night-and-day difference."

A couple of readers reported that YouTube also runs better in HTML5 instead of Flash. YouTube viewers can request to be served HTML5 content when available.

DSL and competition

While we've seen that even customers with nominally fast cable or fiber Internet service can have problems with streaming video, some of our readers said Internet users shouldn't discount the quality of DSL.

"I recently switched this week from a standard DSL line from AT&T at 6Mbps down to the U-verse Fiber Optic service from AT&T at 12Mbps down. I hate it," wrote Look_alive. "Prior to switching, I had zero problems streaming Netflix in HD via Roku on my anemic DSL plan. From the moment I switched to the 'faster, better, stronger' AT&T U-verse 12Mbps service, I have yet to stream any Netflix content in HD."

After examining customer forums where other people complained of the same problem, Look_alive tried several potential fixes, including third-party DNS services, but hasn't been able to play Netflix in HD yet.

While DSL's advertised speeds generally aren't huge, we've seen that nominal speeds often aren't a predictor of actual streaming quality. The VPN and DNS examples show that the path video takes across the Internet is just as (if not more) important than the megabits per second promised by an ISP.

"If your cable provider can't deliver Netflix streams fast enough, you should give DSL a shot," wrote commenter James C. Smith. "I have 6Mbps DSL and I don't have trouble streaming HD from Netflix and YouTube. DSL may not be as fast as cable promises to be, but DSL is faster than cable often turns out to be."

Several commenters noted the paucity of competition in the US, where Internet users are lucky if they can choose from even two broadband providers. It's not that way everywhere, as UK resident Aahjnnotpointed out. Unfortunately, this solution isn't available to every Internet user:

From the UK here, but when my Virgin broadband failed to stream HD video and their customer service team failed to fix it, I found a very simple solution that was 100% effective.

Promoted Comments

A DNS server in a different region will point you to different servers on a particular distributed network and possibly give you a better connection if the servers in your region are slow due to congestion. For example if you live on the east coast and Netflix's east coast servers are clogged with traffic using a DNS based in Seattle will point you to a server in that region which may be less congested.

I previously had AT&T LightSpeed - not really a product they put on their website, but basically FTTH 100/100Mbps service and I never ever ever had any issues, but I moved and low and behold, Verizon 300Mbps has streaming problems. Interestingly the YouTube problems only started about a month ago. Prior to that we could stream 4-5 1080p streams with no problems. Now we cannot get any YouTube content to play without constant interruption (on a single stream). Verizon is clearly either overselling or doing it on purpose, I suspect no matter what they say they are doing it on purpose. Oh yeah if I pick and choose my "sites" I hit, I get my full bandwidth.

Something interesting that I have noticed is that in many situations the slow-down on individuals networks are simply due to the excessive amounts of wireless devices they have attached to their network.. Some with very low signal strengths can cause massive amounts of re-transmits and eat up valuable airtime.

I am not saying there is not an issue going on with the ISPs, etc... But in many instances I have simply installed a second AP in a house and their network was like new...

I've had issues with some live streams in YouTube lately. After a couple minutes it goes to snow and gives an error. I've found that by connecting to a vpn fixes it. Not sure where the issue is coming from. I use google's dns servers but have tried others. VPN gets around it.

I have been accumulating my media stockpile since before the streaming services were anything to get excited about. So if the Internet flakes out for whatever reason, we can just watch something else stored locally.

I have been accumulating my media stockpile since before the streaming services were anything to get excited about. So if the Internet flakes out for whatever reason, we can just watch something else stored locally.

That isn't always practical for a lot of people though. It is fine if you have a local NAS or terabytes of space sitting in your desktop. But for the person who only has their 256GB SSD and 500GB/1TB external HDD as their primary machine, it will be a problem...

I use a VPN but tend not to have too many issues with streaming youtube videos. No Netflix subscription so I can't speak to that...

Something interesting that I have noticed is that in many situations the slow-down on individuals networks are simply due to the excessive amounts of wireless devices they have attached to their network.. Some with very low signal strengths can cause massive amounts of re-transmits and eat up valuable airtime.

I am not saying there is not an issue going on with the ISPs, etc... But in many instances I have simply installed a second AP in a house and their network was like new...

Absolutely. I have, on average, 20 devices with an IP address on my home network. Also have 19 switch ports. Where possible, a device is wired. The iDevices are wireless, of course, as is one PC and one TiVo box that aren't close to a switch.

I'm on a 100Mb tier with Cox. A friend and neighbor is on U-Verse and we both updated Diablo III yesterday. It was slightly north of 9GB. He did one PC, I did two. His time was 6.5 hours - mine was 55 minutes.

I have no complaints and we're heavy NetFlix, Hulu Plus, and Vudu consumers as well as gamers.

"To date, Cogent has had peering disputes with AOL, Teleglobe, France Telecom, Level 3, TeliaSonera, Sprint-Nextel and Verizon. I find it interesting no one in the press mentioned how Cogent always seems to be the one major transit provider who continues to have disputes with so many other network providers, year after year.

A few weeks ago there were all these viral Internet reports of Comcast throttling Netflix content, supposedly backed-up by experiments where somebody would stream Netflix at home on Comcast and get a lower bitrate. Then they’d run that same stream through a VPN (which connects to a different ISP) and get a different and better bit-rate and stream quality. It was the smoking gun gotcha for a lot of folks and 100% sure-fire proof of throttling to some, even though Netflix’s own CEO publicly denied ISPs were throttling. What was happening in the VPN experiment backs-up my earlier points that Netflix was making these networking and performance decisions based on ISP and other factors.

Also, let’s play out what might have happened if Comcast gave Cogent all the capacity it wanted for free. Does that mean Netflix would work well into perpetuity and everyone would be happy? No. Netflix switches providers quite frequently. What if Netflix then moved traffic to NTT and Telia, we’d be back where we started, as those providers would then need all the capacity they wanted on Comcast. What if Netflix started making other traffic shifts to extract greater concessions from ISPs and transit vendors? Fortunately we’re now past that with this Netflix and Comcast deal, but instead of seeing the benefit here to Netflix’s customers, the picture is clouded with far-fetched negatives. The winner in the whole deal is you and me, the consumer. We get better quality video and Netflix gets a cheaper cost over time to deliver the stream to us, which keeps them from having to raise the price of our subscription to give us better quality."

"It’s easy to use Net Neutrality as an excuse for why there are quality issues with streaming, but that’s not accurate. Delivering video over the web has inherent flaws and it’s not like traditional broadcast distribution that scales much easier. It’s one of the main reasons why pay TV won’t be replaced by Internet streaming at scale. It’s too expensive to support so many eyeballs while also providing the best quality possible. Case in point. If all we wanted was to have better video quality, why doesn’t Netflix encode their videos at a higher bitrate, say 8-9Mbps and deliver all of their content that way? Reason is that the ISPs would have trouble delivering it with good quality, which is the whole reason why Netflix is trying to get ISPs to join Open Connect and allow Netflix to put servers inside the ISPs network. While that sounds like a simple and free solution Netflix is providing to ISPs, the reality is far from that.

This is the problem that Netflix is currently facing with most of the major ISPs in the U.S. who won’t join Open Connect, which has made Netflix’s current multi-tiered approach to video delivery complicated. Even though Netflix is not causing a lot of people to cancel their cable, many ISPs sell pay TV services, have their own OTT services and see Netflix as a competitor. Some ISPs have also told me they would rather deploy a solution like transparent caching which would help the ISP with caching all types of video content, not just Netflix’s. Netflix has to make some decisions about how they work with ISPs, what role third party CDNs will have delivering their content and how much of a network they want to own and operate on their own. The good news is that I think all of these things can be worked out over time, amongst Netflix, ISPs, CDNs and transit providers, but it’s going to require Netflix to change their current approach. I’ll have more on that in a follow up post."

I previously had AT&T LightSpeed - not really a product they put on their website, but basically FTTH 100/100Mbps service and I never ever ever had any issues, but I moved and low and behold, Verizon 300Mbps has streaming problems. Interestingly the YouTube problems only started about a month ago. Prior to that we could stream 4-5 1080p streams with no problems. Now we cannot get any YouTube content to play without constant interruption (on a single stream). Verizon is clearly either overselling or doing it on purpose, I suspect no matter what they say they are doing it on purpose. Oh yeah if I pick and choose my "sites" I hit, I get my full bandwidth.

It's not always the raw speed. Latency and a few other factors affect your quality of Internet connection.

A DNS server in a different region will point you to different servers on a particular distributed network and possibly give you a better connection if the servers in your region are slow due to congestion. For example if you live on the east coast and Netflix's east coast servers are clogged with traffic using a DNS based in Seattle will point you to a server in that region which may be less congested.

I'm on Charter Communications, which hasn't been reported to be involved in the throttling issues, and I do not have Netflix or Youtube problems.

That said, I keep both of my DNS servers as 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Charter bought up my region. Since Charter took over I strongly believe they are throttling. When I download from Steam, my cable modem gets disconnected every 15 minutes. As soon as Steam downloads stop, my cable modem remains steady. And I've noticed that Amazon video can only use about half my available bandwidth no matter what I do. I never had this problems before Charter took over.

I'm on Charter Communications, which hasn't been reported to be involved in the throttling issues, and I do not have Netflix or Youtube problems.

That said, I keep both of my DNS servers as 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Charter bought up my region. Since Charter took over I strongly believe they are throttling. When I download from Steam, my cable modem gets disconnected every 15 minutes. As soon as Steam downloads stop, my cable modem remains steady. And I've noticed that Amazon video can only use about half my available bandwidth no matter what I do. I never had this problems before Charter took over.

Sounds like you're just getting a bad signal lock on your cable modem. They probably split your line to feed in a new customer and you're noticing the issue now. Call and complain, they'll generally send a technician out if you make enough noise and fix it for you.

I'm on Charter Communications, which hasn't been reported to be involved in the throttling issues, and I do not have Netflix or Youtube problems.

That said, I keep both of my DNS servers as 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Charter bought up my region. Since Charter took over I strongly believe they are throttling. When I download from Steam, my cable modem gets disconnected every 15 minutes. As soon as Steam downloads stop, my cable modem remains steady. And I've noticed that Amazon video can only use about half my available bandwidth no matter what I do. I never had this problems before Charter took over.

get a new dociss 3 modem. this is a normal issue with noise on the wire that newer cable modems handle better

Something interesting that I have noticed is that in many situations the slow-down on individuals networks are simply due to the excessive amounts of wireless devices they have attached to their network.. Some with very low signal strengths can cause massive amounts of re-transmits and eat up valuable airtime.

I am not saying there is not an issue going on with the ISPs, etc... But in many instances I have simply installed a second AP in a house and their network was like new...

yep, i used to get disconnected from xbox live on single player until i went back to cat5 cable

wifi is like the old 30 year old hubs. i have 40 wifi networks around me and everyone is always broadcasting their signal into the air any everyone's router has to filter that traffic

alot of people keep talking about google dns servers. alot of people don't realize it uses anycast, thus it provide different ip translations for different people depending on regions.

thus someone in texas using google will resolve netflix different then someone in new york.

that said there are routers on the market that will route all traffic over VPN. i do it all the time

yep

used to be a problem with streaming itunes and google dns. the real IP's can be anywhere where apple uses akamai CDN's. people wanted to be cool and ended up streaming content from the other side of the USA instead of their ISP and wondered by it was barely playable

I'm on Metrocast in Southern Maryland (50 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up) and haven't had an issue with either Netflix or Youtube. In general, Netflix has been fantastic since moving out here, playing HD quality all the time without fail. I use my desktop hooked up to my 55" HDTV, and it's linked to the modem via a USB 3.0 Linksys Wi-Fi adapter (maintains a ~300 Mbps connection to the router, love it).

I have the same experience as grimlog. In most situations where a video just sits there buffering at 720p or 1080p on YouTube and refreshing doesn't seem to help, using a simple download extension can either go at rather fast rates (3-5 MB/s) or at least fast enough that it could have streamed it fine.

I find it interesting no one in the press mentioned how Cogent always seems to be the one major transit provider who continues to have disputes with so many other network providers, year after year.

Isn't it possible that the reason why they have so many disputes is because of the high Netflix bandwidth? Level3 has also had issues in the past with high Netflix bandwidth causing peering disputes.

Honestly, I think we've really hit a turning point for ISPs. ISPs have always been a lot like buffets where the people that eat less (use less data) easily offset the cost of those who eat a lot (use more data). The problem is that streaming has become very popular over the past two to three years, and that has essentially made it so some that used to consume little are now consuming far more. I know Ars will post the Internet usage chart in random news articles, and the last time they did (earlier this month I believe), it still had YouTube and Netflix at over 50% of the downstream traffic.

I have been accumulating my media stockpile since before the streaming services were anything to get excited about. So if the Internet flakes out for whatever reason, we can just watch something else stored locally.

I have been accumulating my media stockpile since before the streaming services were anything to get excited about. So if the Internet flakes out for whatever reason, we can just watch something else stored locally.

Network issues and the annoying tendency of video services to randomly remove things. I have quite the Blu-ray collection and I don't have to worry about, say, losing access to The Lion King and thus not being able to get my fix of Elton John's awesome music.

I don't need an Internet connection for it at all, there's never any buffering issues, and the video always plays in full HD quality. I can add to my collection any time I like, and it won't get any smaller unless I wish it to.

I also need the subtitles/closed captioning to watch, since I'm hard of hearing, and most streaming video doesn't have captioning even though that situation is improving on both Netflix and Amazon Prime. I only have one Blu-ray that has no captions or subtitles ("Raise the Titanic") and more than half of the videos I've tried and nearly all of the YouTube videos I've ever watched aren't captioned. Alas, when I complained to Amazon about the missing captions on RTT, I never got a response. At least I was able to post a review on the product page warning others, and several people responded in shock that a Blu-ray would be missing those things in 2013.

Maybe that makes me a little bit of a Luddite in the eyes of some, but I like being self-contained. I do look forward to the day when captioning regulations finally require 100% captioning on all streaming videos -- why should I be left out of Internet video watching when the law has seen to it that I can watch television?

I'm on Charter Communications, which hasn't been reported to be involved in the throttling issues, and I do not have Netflix or Youtube problems.

That said, I keep both of my DNS servers as 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Charter bought up my region. Since Charter took over I strongly believe they are throttling. When I download from Steam, my cable modem gets disconnected every 15 minutes. As soon as Steam downloads stop, my cable modem remains steady. And I've noticed that Amazon video can only use about half my available bandwidth no matter what I do. I never had this problems before Charter took over.

Sounds like you're just getting a bad signal lock on your cable modem. They probably split your line to feed in a new customer and you're noticing the issue now. Call and complain, they'll generally send a technician out if you make enough noise and fix it for you.

Also think about checking any cable splitters at your house. If they aren't shielded and solid connections it can degrade your service causing it to drop occasionally.

A DNS server in a different region will point you to different servers on a particular distributed network and possibly give you a better connection if the servers in your region are slow due to congestion. For example if you live on the east coast and Netflix's east coast servers are clogged with traffic using a DNS based in Seattle will point you to a server in that region which may be less congested.

I haven't had any problems yet. Comcast recently sold our area to another provider and while they have been a little hitchy during the transition, there will be no data caps. Netflix performance has been flawless. When I was at university I dumped Comcast when they increased their fees by $10 across the board for no reason. Believe it or not, the internet still works on DSL. While I waited for sites to load, I thought about Comcast not getting my money.

I have been accumulating my media stockpile since before the streaming services were anything to get excited about. So if the Internet flakes out for whatever reason, we can just watch something else stored locally.

Network issues and the annoying tendency of video services to randomly remove things. I have quite the Blu-ray collection and I don't have to worry about, say, losing access to The Lion King and thus not being able to get my fix of Elton John's awesome music.

I don't need an Internet connection for it at all, there's never any buffering issues, and the video always plays in full HD quality. I can add to my collection any time I like, and it won't get any smaller unless I wish it to.

I also need the subtitles/closed captioning to watch, since I'm hard of hearing, and most streaming video doesn't have captioning even though that situation is improving on both Netflix and Amazon Prime. I only have one Blu-ray that has no captions or subtitles ("Raise the Titanic") and more than half of the videos I've tried and nearly all of the YouTube videos I've ever watched aren't captioned. Alas, when I complained to Amazon about the missing captions on RTT, I never got a response. At least I was able to post a review on the product page warning others, and several people responded in shock that a Blu-ray would be missing those things in 2013.

Maybe that makes me a little bit of a Luddite in the eyes of some, but I like being self-contained. I do look forward to the day when captioning regulations finally require 100% captioning on all streaming videos -- why should I be left out of Internet video watching when the law has seen to it that I can watch television?

Nothing wrong with building your own library. I feel the same way.

HOWEVER

You're missing the point with Netflix. There's a vast amount of video available that I personally would not want to buy. I'm currently rewatching Sliders and Mission Impossible. Both are great series but it's not something I'd want to buy.

There are quiet a few others out there that I have watched but don't feet the need to buy on Blu-Ray. Self-Contained doesnt help in this situation.

A DNS server in a different region will point you to different servers on a particular distributed network and possibly give you a better connection if the servers in your region are slow due to congestion. For example if you live on the east coast and Netflix's east coast servers are clogged with traffic using a DNS based in Seattle will point you to a server in that region which may be less congested.

It's not a fix all and it doesn't work 100% of the time.

So you're saying that (and I'm oversimplifying obviously) querying

Code:

nslookup netflixstreamingserver.com seattlednsserver.com

will result in a different netflix server IP than

Code:

nslookup netflixstreamingserver.com newyorkdnsserver.com

?

Does not compute...

Does compute quite easily, being as Netflix and Youtube are both distributed services, running closer (in terms of network hops) to dns 2 than dns 1 (simplified massively, but there are lots of entry points to the same, distributed data, with different geographical and network locations.)

//edit: To make it a little simpler, you shouldn't be looking up the same netflix streaming server from different dns start points.

To people asking about how changing the DNS can fix the issue the answer is really the same for all of the suggestions made. VPN, or DNS or Proxy or the Downloader apps or anything else you can come up with. You are trying to change the route you take to get the content or where you are getting the content from to avoid the congestion.

How does changing the DNS do this? By affecting the way the CDN handles your request. It results in you being sent to a different server which results in a different path to the content. This is the basis for how CDN's work. They find your closest server and route you to that one so that the servers split the load and so that the connection should be faster because there are fewer steps along the way.

The VPN can work either by changing the server you are getting the content from or simply by forcing you to go to C to get from A to B.

The Downloader apps are probably hitting a different server and therefore a different route to download the files.

A DNS server in a different region will point you to different servers on a particular distributed network and possibly give you a better connection if the servers in your region are slow due to congestion. For example if you live on the east coast and Netflix's east coast servers are clogged with traffic using a DNS based in Seattle will point you to a server in that region which may be less congested.

It's not a fix all and it doesn't work 100% of the time.

So you're saying that (and I'm oversimplifying obviously) querying

Code:

nslookup netflixstreamingserver.com seattlednsserver.com

will result in a different netflix server IP than

Code:

nslookup netflixstreamingserver.com newyorkdnsserver.com

?

Does not compute...

Does compute quite easily, being as Netflix and Youtube are both distributed services, running closer (in terms of network hops) to dns 2 than dns 1 (simplified massively, but there are lots of entry points to the same, distributed data, with different geographical and network locations.)

//edit: To make it a little simpler, you shouldn't be looking up the same netflix streaming server from different dns start points.

But surely they are (region-)load-balancing based on your IP, not based on the DNS server you are using to connect to the service...

//edit: right, it's not that you are using a different DNS start point... it's that's you're actually using a different service start point, the selection of which IMO is not governed by your DNS, but rather by the service provider itself

WTF does DNS have to do with the quality of a streaming service? It's not like youtube switches to another streaming server mid-stream and your device has to figure out what its IP should be.

some services use the IP of the referring DNS server to determine your location to stream the data from the closest location

How do these services know which DNS server reffered me to them? I would assume they merely look up my IP region and load-balance the streaming accordingly.

DNS is not my specialty but i have read that akamai does this. they look at the IP of the DNS server to get your location and then pick the CDN based on that. and even then from what i have read netflix only uses AWS for the account and authentication, not for streaming the video where they have their own data centers for that

some years back people on google dns has problems streaming apple itunes movies because even though google dns has only two IPs, the real IP's are all over the world. instead of streaming from a local copy from akamai, people would be streaming from an akamai server across the country

that said, i used to use these DNS services, but for the last few years i've been using my time warner DNS IP's with no issues

Love to watch standup comedy? I do. Netflix has plenty of standup on disk, providing you like your comedy from before 2009. If you want standup from the last 5 years, stream it or pound sand. And I'm noticing more and more genres are now streaming only--if you want a disk, you won't get anything from the last several years.

I've measured my download speeds at 30Mbps which is screaming. So why don't I stream my Netflix? Verizon Wireless, baby. A month of streaming (200 hours) would run over $4000 (FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS).

So now that Netflix is apparently giving up on disks, what is the alternative? I have super speeds, but only 6GB per month. My OTA antenna will pull in one channel, so there is that. What else is available?